Who will buy? They will

It follows up on Victor Malarek's 2005 book, "The Natashas," which exposed the brutal lives lived by the 800,000 annual victims of human trafficking and sexual slavery. "The Johns" addresses the demand side of the prostitution equation, focusing on men who visit prostitutes. It concludes with Malarek's persuasive argument in favor of policies to prevent the suffering of trafficked women by diminishing demand.

Malarek's basic conclusion about johns is that "there is really no such thing as a typical john. Few of them look like what most people imagine men who purchase sex to be: awkward, creepy loners fixated on porn before heading out for something more real. To the contrary, many of these men look like very ordinary guys."

And many of them are not particularly bad guys. There are johns who do extremely evil things, as demonstrated by the local example of Gary Ridgway, who killed at least 48 women, many of them prostitutes. However, most are not malicious. They tend to be very misogynistic and hold dehumanized views of women, but they don't patronize prostitutes with the intent of harming them. In other words, they're buying into the idea that "men who buy sex are just doing what men do."

They also buy into the myth of what Malarek, an investigative journalist, calls the "happy hooker"